Each Friday we share some favorite reporting on, and examples of, data driven visualizations and embedded analytics that came onto our radar in the past week.
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Map Sticks: The OpenText Innovation Tour touched down in New York City this past week. (Learn about upcoming sessions in Ottawa, São Paulo, Calgary, Johannesburg, Shanghai and Washington DC here.) After meeting with customers, my colleague Tom Bayens (@tbay41) visited the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. He loved the collection and told me about the stick chart (pictured above) in the museum’s collection. Charts like this one were used by ancient mariners in the Marshall Islands to traverse thousands of miles of the open Pacific Ocean without modern navigation tools. Made of carved sticks and shells, the chart isn’t a literal map; instead, it depicts the interaction of ocean swells around atolls and islands. The museum calls the stick chart “a visualization of seafarers’ secret knowledge obtained over generations.” It’s a good reminder that complex data visualization doesn’t necessarily rely on computers.
Food and Water: As the western drought crisis deepens, Californians are being told to find new ways to conserve water. Start with your dinner plate: the Los Angeles Times has created an interactive website that lets you visually assemble a plate of food (choosing one protein, starch, fruit or vegetable, and drink) and enter the amount of each dish; from that data, the site computes how many gallons of water were used to produce the meal. The site, created by Kyle Kim, Jon Schleuss and Priya Krishnakumar, also includes a bubble chart comparing various foods’ water footprints. Michael Singer served this item to the Data Driven Digest.
Little Green Data: In case you missed it, March 20 was Extraterrestrial Abduction Day, a holiday (of sorts) for those who believe in such things. If UFOs are real, they’re much more likely to be spotted west of the Rocky Mountains in the United States – at least according to the above map created by Find The Best. Green indicates more sightings, and purple means fewer; click through to visit the interactive version, which correlates data from the National UFO Reporting Center and the US Census to visualize per-capita UFO sightings. (You can also toggle to see raw numbers of sightings.) Along with the map you’ll find a critique by Rafi Schwartz of the online magazine Good. Thanks to Mica Block for beaming this item to us.
DataViz Learning (bonus item): O’Reilly is offering a terrific series of videos on Effective Data Visualization. Hosted and taught by former Stanford Professor Jeffrey Heer (@jeffrey_heer), co-creator of D3.js and Data Wrangler, the 12-part series (a screenshot is above) covers design fundamentals, data analysis, data reduction, and visualization of Big Data. The first three episodes (a great sampler) are free for a limited time; $69.99 unlocks the whole set.
Got a favorite or trending resource on embedded analytics and data visualization? Share it with the readers of the OpenText Analytics blog. Submit ideas to blogactuate@actuate.com or add a comment below. Subscribe (at left) and we’ll email you when new entries are posted.
Recent Data Driven Digests:
April 3: Yield curve, TED Talks, Divvy Bikes, song lyrics
March 27: 50 million meme, solar energy dips during eclipse, sound in Berlin
March 20: Pi Day, Dear Data, meteor strikes